A not-so-recent Forbes article (March 2009) highlighted which American states were the best to live in based on a national survey conducted by Gallup. Do the results live up to some other measurements? Let's see...

I completed reading The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in April of this year, and it was a thoroughly invigorating book.  During the final evening of reading this page-turner of a book, I finally came to the author's primary assertion that reality is far more Mandelbrotian than Guassian in nature.  In other words, we live in a world of chaos and the unexpected rather than a world of bell curves of normality...

The JMP Blog has a half-advertisement, half-informative post today about measuring innovation. This post points the another NY Times Freakanomics blog post about the same idea: how does one go about measuring, quantifying, determining the impacts of, and analyzing innovation and how innovation grows a business, grows an industry, or grows global GDP?

Both blogs tend to agree that measuring innovation is hard. And the Freakanomics blog has several experts all talking about how measuring disruptive innovations (the invention of the Internet, cell phones, etc.) is really hard because there are so many factors and variables involved in attempting to measure such innovations.